NASA’s $4.3 billion planet-hunting Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope arrives in Florida

The last time NASA’s Pegasus barge floated up to Kennedy Space Center, it was hauling the core stage for next year’s Artemis III mission worth more than $2 billion. Sunday’s payload more than doubled that.

Read more Florida gas prices dropped 20 cents last week

The $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which arrived at the turn basin at KSC’s Launch Complex 39, is named in honor of NASA’s first chief astronomer. It’s set to launch as early as August 30 from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-B on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.

The trip involved the space telescope getting hauled from NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland to the port of Baltimore to make what turned out to be about an eight-day trip to Florida. Teams ran into a hiccup early though as the two air conditioning units were not keeping the temperature cool enough.

“We do have a tight temperature tolerance on the observatory. We need to stay below 74 degrees,” said Neil Patel, the lead transport engineer out of Goddard for the space telescope.

He said they had to rent additional units and bring on an emergency team to ensure everything stayed cool.

“We’re like a basically a MacGyver crew that came in,” he said. “We added additional units, and those units did maintain the temperature quite well.”

Before it gets to the pad, it will spend time at KSC’s Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility getting prepped for launch. Teams hauled it housed within its protective container called “The Chariot” from the Pegasus barge on Sunday evening.

“Once we get that in there, close the door, then the real fun starts,” said Chris Reid with NASA’s Launch Services Program. ”

That includes filling it up with about 290 gallons of hydrazine fuel for its trip to Lagrange point 2, a point in space about 1 million miles away that puts the Earth between it and the sun. It’s the same spot James Webb and other space telescopes are parked giving it a pristine view of the galaxy.

Its goal is to unlock the mysteries of dark energy while planet hunting outside our solar system.

“There’s going to be a lot of new observations trying to understand some of the big questions about what we call the ‘Black Universe,’ understand things like dark energy and dark matter to understand how the universe is evolving in an accelerated manner, is expanding and through something we call dark energy, and hunt for new planets,” said Lucas Paganini, a program manager for the space telescope in NASA’s Astrophysics Division.

He said it will complement the likes of the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990, and James Webb Space Telescope, which launched in 2021, as it is armed with different instruments including a 300 megapixel camera and will be cast a much wider net using infrared light when viewing the sky.

“Telescopes like Hubble and Webb, what we’ve done in the past is observe a specific object,” he said, but Roman’s approach will be “to observe huge portions of the sky … billions of galaxies, billions of stars, and discover thousands of new planets beyond the solar system.”

Compared to Hubble, Roman will have 100 times wider view, even though the lens is the same size, and it will gather data 1,000 times faster.

“It’s not only an observatory, this is a new way to do science,” he said.

He paid homage to the telescope’s namesake, who was also given the moniker, “The Mother of Hubble.”

“She was a key person in our exploration of space. She understood that in order to better understand the universe, you have to go in space,” he said. “She made Hubble possible.”

He said the Roman telescope builds on Hubble and James Webb as well.

“We have learned a lot of lessons from from Hubble. We’re using a similar mirror, but lighter. We know what we need in order to understand wider portions of the skies by changing some aspects of the design, and of course, Webb is also an engineering marvel. It’s impressive what we can do with Webb, something we cannot do with Roman, right? That’s why they’re highly complementary. And eventually, what we learn from Roman is going to help us develop the next generation telescope, which is the Habitable Worlds Observatory.”

While the price tag is in the billions, it has come in under budget and ahead of schedule, with a launch about eight months earlier than originally planned. That hallmark has been one of the highlights NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has been touting.

“Roman’s accelerated development is a true success story of what we can achieve when public investment, institutional expertise and private enterprise come together to take on the near impossible missions that change the world,” he said at a media event at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in April.

Read more Asking Eric: Do I just keep cringing at her disgusting habit, or tell her what I think?

Nicky Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said the project for a dark energy telescope has been in the works since it was recommended in the National Research Council’s 2010 decadal survey that ranks which astronomy and astrophysics projects should be pursued. The hardware came together at Goddard over the last six years.

“Since early in 2020 the Roman team has worked almost around the clock to develop and test the spacecraft and the hardware, completing the flagship mission in just six years, which is a true testament to the agency’s commitment to do science, cutting edge science even faster,” she said.

She touted the speed of the telescope, but also the amount of data it will generate.

“The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a sheer powerhouse,” she said.

She noted Hubble gathered 172 terabytes of date over its first 30 years in service while Roman’s capacity will be do send 1.4 terabytes of data every day. Its primary lifespan is a five-year mission, although it has enough fuel to keep it up and running at least 10 years.

“That means it will potentially have about 2,500 terabytes over the course of its five year mission, and basically gathering like a hypothetical stack of science papers that would reach up to beyond the moon,” she said.

She noted that for now, the science community is aware of about 6,000 planets outside our solar system.

“Roman will discover tens of thousands of new planets outside our solar system. It will reveal billions of galaxies, thousands of supernova and tens of billions of stars,” she said. “That is an extremely exciting and literally all of the science that we can use to apply and build off our interconnected NASA science portfolio, Roman will help us address the question of how common solar systems like ours actually are, while also literally expanding the human mind to what the universe contains at an astounding rate.”

She also noted the space telescope, including the best coronagraph that has ever flown in space, and it’s a vanguard for a similar sensor being developed for a future telescope in NASA’s plans, the Habitable Worlds Observatory.

“It is so important to us that we get this coronagraph into space and get that first milestone towards the next mission,” she said

Julie McEnery, Roman telescope’s senior project scientist, is keen about Roman’s planet-finding capability, but is even more so about its tackling of the mysteries of dark energy.

“Current observations hint that our standard model of the universe is incorrect. Roman will be able to confirm these and set us on the path to understanding what’s right,” she said. “Our main survey will take more than a year. It’s huge. If we were to take the single image that is produced from our main survey and try and fully display it with a set of 4k TVs, you’d need more than half million 4k TVs.”

She said that survey will be used to study how the structures in the universe grew and evolved over time.

“These are the keys to unlocking the fundamental nature of dark matter, dark energy and the fabric of the universe itself,” she said.

The survey will also point it at our own galaxy periodically to monitor hundreds of millions of stars.

“We’re not going to just image millions of stars. We’re going to find a treasure trove of exoplanets, up to 40 times more than are known today. So think of this as the largest census we’ve ever done of planets in our galaxy,” she said.

She’s more excited about how pointing the telescope at 2 billion galaxies, means that there are literally 2,000 “one-in-a-million” mysteries out there Roman could uncover.

“We’re going to be surveying patches of the sky going back over and over and over again to find new things that go bump in the night,” she said. “I very much hope, and in fact, expect, that the most exciting science from Roman is going to be the things that we didn’t expect, that we couldn’t predict, but that will set the new deep questions for future missions to address.”

Read more Orlando Sentinel 150: Monday Memory of Orlando wanting to be Florida’s capital